Last year, there were 28 million bike-shares trips in American cities — a remarkable 25 percent increase in one year alone, according to a new report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

Since 2012, the number of bike-share trips has grown ten-fold, double the rate of growth in bike-share bikes, meaning the systems are being used more intensively. This is all with a safety record that is practically unblemished. So far there has been just one recorded death of a bike share user.

Bike-share growth should continue in 2017, with San Francisco and New York both planning major expansions.

An increasing number of U.S. bike-share systems are offering discounts for low-income riders, NACTO reports. The big success in terms of making bike-share more accessible is Indego in Philadelphia, where monthly passes can be purchased for $5. NACTO reports that 44 percent of Indego users come from households with annual income below $35,000.

Most of the growth in bike-share usage is limited to a few major cities, however. Citi Bike in New York, Capital Bikeshare in the DC region, Citi Bike in Miami, Divvy in Chicago, and Hubway in Boston account for 85 percent of all trips — an indication of how much catching up other cities have to do.

What distinguishes the successful cities are their dense station networks, according to NACTO, which enable high-volume usage by siting bike-share stations within convenient walking distance anywhere in the service area. Many smaller systems — there are 55 cities with more than 100 bikes across the U.S. — simply aren’t designed to be viable transportation options for large numbers of people.

In it’s first year, Citibike in NY had over double the rides per bike than any other major system in the world, at about 6 on average and 10 on peak weather days. Realistically the only way for NY to expand rides is expansion, as re-balancing efforts actually cost more at that scale (>$1 per ride provided) than buying additional bikes (1500) and stations (3000-4000 per dock)

I was specifically referring to the success of a bike share system. Yes, infrastructure is, of course, necessary but the NYC experience tells us that it is not the silver bullet. You can see this by comparing the share growth with that of Chicago which doesn’t have nearly the station density but shares similar bike and transit infrastructure.

But yes, totally agree with you about the need for infrastructure to make a much larger portion of the population comfortable with navigating the city by bike.

So far, the customer base of American bike-share systems has skewed toward affluent white men. But cities have been working to make the systems more useful and accessible to a broader spectrum of people, and in a new report, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has compiled some of the lessons learned. Here are a […]

Bike-share has exploded in the last decade — and in North America, just in the last few years. What started as a shaky concept in Amsterdam in the 1960s has matured into a viable transit option worldwide, with 600 systems offering more than 600,000 bikes. The nonprofit Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) is […]